


dividing dust and light

by Jagged



Category: Borderlands
Genre: (it's Jack good riddance), Alternate Universe, Canonical Character Death, Coping, Gen, Jack Is The Worst Parent And Angel Deserved Better, Past Abuse, References to Addiction, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 11:10:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jagged/pseuds/Jagged
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel survives. (That's the easy part.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	dividing dust and light

Static sings just underneath your skin, in the scarred places where the ports used to snap in. It’s a comfort, almost; familiar, soothing. You are watching Jack speak and shout and you know you are about to see him die. This is after. You are sitting somewhere in Sanctuary and you are shaking with the strain that came from accessing the ECHO logs they’ve been careful to keep away from you and you are watching, you are detached, you are—

—breathing.  Alive. Sunlight falls through windows and drags heavy over your skin. Inside your head his voice, the edge to it. He is alone and surrounded and this is how you hoped, how you intended for it to happen. You are watching him at the moment of his death, from the other side, and you feel light-headed and strange.

The feed stutters, blood in each frame, blood on his face, when you tell it to pause; rewind; restart.

-

They have a lot of words for him, none of them nice. You try them in the relative privacy of your own mind, find them aborted before they ever reach your tongue. _Language_ , chides the ghost of him, phantom hand on your shoulder, fingers cool over your hair, looming even through absence. These are the things the vault hunters will never see. He is no stranger to gentleness or quiet. When you were a child—your entire life—or maybe only these days—…there are hundreds of paths spinning outwards in your mind, and he casts his shadow on every one.

It seems so natural. He has been your entire world since forever, father and jailer and purpose all at once. You have not always resented it; even now with rebellion slowly bubbling under the surface you are his eyes and ears and party to all his schemes.

You know his names. John, Jack, sir, father… dad, little parcels of meaning and distance and other, more complicated things. You use them like weapons, when you have the courage, and he lets you because he thinks he made you: because the only two words he needs are _Angel,_ and _mine_.

(You say nothing. Some things are just self-evident.)

-

Brick is the only one out of the original vault hunters who will meet your eyes and not snarl or bristle or tense, which should not be a surprise and yet comes as a shock every time. You know them, better than near anyone else. You watched them for so long, there is in you a seed of familiarity, of longing—or is it possessiveness? One evening when the lines on your skin flare and catch your nerves aflame you try to lose yourself in semantics, to untangle the mess Jack has made of you.

“Sorry kid, this part always sucks,” Lilith says. There’s a faint line around her throat where the skin is still too new and raw. The electric scent of eridium clings to her and part of you is drawn, magnetic, hungry. You think— _No._ You are shaking. You keep your feet still. It is so small, this body. You used to see so much, to have so much room to think.

It’s not that Lilith hates you. Resents, distrusts—of course. Is unsettled by you, maybe. Something in the cant of her hips, the way her fingers twitch. You want to say _I’m not a kid_ , but you know _kid_ is better than _traitor_ , and anyway between the two of you she’s the one with the gun. You know names. You remember blood.

For years you thought her dead, but never did it occur to you to feel grief for it. You are unused to loss. Withdrawal burns you from the inside and, forcing your tongue to work through the haze, you ask: “Is it always like this for you?”

“I’m not exactly an expert. I mean, burning stuff, melting people, sure. But the eridium?”  She shrugs, a wary kind of sheepishness to her movement. “You’re conscious. That’s a pretty nice start I’d say.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Isn’t it?”

You look at her and for a moment it’s like you’re back to that first day, the bright sun and the bus creaking, and she’s a stranger who could become something better or more, if only you could find the right paths, the right words.

“I don’t understand why I’m…” Things change. They did what you wanted them to and here you are now in their hands. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to let me die?”

This is not what you meant to say, but it’s a good question, nevertheless. You’ve seen the way she looks when she puts her hand in the space between ribs and hip, which you know is where Jack likes (liked) to stab when he feels (felt) vicious. She would have been justified. The others, too. Roland’s absence is like an open wound.

“We’re not like—“ _him_ , she looks like she wants to say, and there must be something to your face at that because she does not continue, only shakes her head wearily.

Later, when you are both—not well, but better—she will say: _If someone shoots at you and misses, don’t wait for the second shot; keep moving_ ; then, at your blank look: _ok, so much for metaphors. What I mean is, stop dwelling and look forward_.

This is what you know: you can get used to anything. Lilith is standing across the room from you and what you’re feeling is ugly and complicated. She turns her head. Her eyes burn in the evening glow, gold and animal.  

-

You think, once and once only: _there wasn’t supposed to be an after_.

-

There’s a moment during the fight where he falls to his knees, blood in his mouth and strange things shifting under and across his face and you know, from the half-second of pause that happens then, that this is Maya’s feed you’ve tapped in on.

On Pandora faith is kept to fire, bullets, pyres. On Pandora true believers would eat the flesh of their gods then kill in their names (ask Salvador). This planet has no time or inclination for obeisance. Jack erred in this,  trying to mold her into something that wouldn’t buck under the reins: you can see this now. Pandora is fangs and claws, wind and sand and erosion like teeth gnawing on everything not made for her. Pandora let him stroll in and think he could win and then laughed in a roar of magma as the ones she baptized in scars and fire and acid brought him down bleeding.

This is what the guardian part of your angel notices, and thrills at the sight. The rest of you—the parts where his fingerprints are etched in so deep you do not think they will ever fade—thinks: _look, how he’s still speaking, how he will not let them take that last thing away from him; look, how even now he is so sure he can win_.

Is it fatigue or shame, that makes you tremble? Or could it be—and deep down, you _know_ —recognition; understanding—

—pride?

-

What everyone remembers is: you were (are) his.

What nobody understands is: possession is a two-way street.

-

“Don’t try and pretend you’re still asleep, Angel. I’m not in the mood for games.”

You don’t have to open your eyes to know his scowl or the angry white of his knuckles on the bedframe. You open them anyway. Light bursts into your eyes, so bright you half-expect warnings to start flashing up before remembering you haven’t used HUDs since the very early years. Standing against the window he is menacing, statuesque.

You are not currently wired to anything and your insides sings with pain like they want to burst out of your skin. Sitting up is the fourth-most painful thing you have done in your life, right behind eridium pumps one, two and three snapping away. You are not dead, and neither is he. It’s been a while since you could look at the sky directly but you can’t even think of that right now, you look at him instead.

You say: “Dad.”

“Y’know I should thank you, because that little stunt you pulled back there? Really unpleasant and all, but damn if it didn’t turn out great. For me, I mean. Your bandit pals—well.” The mask is a pure condensate of smugness, briefly clouding out the rage. He drags the words out like he’s savouring them. “Roland’s dead, and I got Lilith to pick up where you… left. Congrats. You single-handedly destroyed Crimson Raider leadership. Years of trying and you hand them both to me on a silver platter in the same evening.”

He walks closer. “Anyone would think you’d done it on purpose, it went so well. So—“ His hand closes around your wrist, crushing. “What the _hell_ were you doing, Angel?”

“Quitting.” Your lips are cracked, your mouth dry. You look away from him, not out of fear or deference but because he hates it. He wants to feel your eyes on him always.

“No, that’s not how it works. You don’t do anything without me telling you first, and you certainly don’t get to jump ship. You’re mine, you hear? You’re my daughter and you don’t get to. Almost. Die. Not so close—Angel, are you listening to me?”

“Uh-huh.” It’s not technically a lie. About a tenth of your attention is on him, because that’s the minimum required for safety, but the rest of you is slowly fighting through the haze of your powers pointlessly reaching for eridium reserves it just doesn’t have and the loss of processing power to assimilate the new information he’s giving you.

“Don’t you ‘uh-huh’ me. And look at me when I’m talking to you!” He pulls your face towards him, fingers under your chin in a twisted recall of softer days.

“What happened to the others? The new ones?”

“Lilith got them out.” His grip on your arm is painful but it is worth it, to know this. You bite down on your lip to stop from smiling, but he sees and his eyes go dangerous.

“It’s too late for them. Don’t think you’re getting a chance to do anything like that ever again.”

“I know,” you tell him. In the jumbled wreckage of your system/network/mind you think you have found—not a path, but a seed, maybe. Something that could grow. You look at him, blue into blue and green and the scars underneath the mask only you have ever seen, and you tell him “This wasn’t about dying, Jack.” You raise the hand he’s not crushing to his face, brush the blue lines of your birthright over his brow like a blessing. He has gone still, fallen silent now, for you, only you. You know him and the knowledge is like a string wound tight inside of you, ready to be played. “Do you remember, when I told you I could see all the roads our story could take—how everything here, and more, could be yours?”

Talking hurts and you can feel unconsciousness lurking at the back of your mind, but you are not dead and neither is he and everything is moving very fast. Opportunity shines through the windows at you, artificial and bright. You tell him: “It was a calculated risk; I knew what I was doing.” You tell him: “Now nothing can stop you.” You tell him: “You must go now; after we win I will be waiting for you.”

(You do not say: _in none of my projections have we ever both survived the end_ , or _In truth I was giving you a chance_ or _I love you_. It's been so long – you can't quite be sure of what is, and isn't, true.)

-

“Were you lost, too? After you left.”

You’re asking of Maya, who’s leaning against the doorframe, watching you watch him fall to his knees for the hundredth time. She’s interrupting on a pretty private moment but you’re not supposed to have access to those: by unspoken agreement neither of you apologize. Out of all of them she understands it best, this need to really know.

“Freedom’s a tricky thing,” she agrees. “Wanna tip? Don’t try to look for answers—they never come out the way you want. Focus on asking the right questions. Pandora’ll do the rest.”

“Who says I want to stay on Pandora?”

There are seven new scars on Maya, all acquired since she first set foot on the planet. You were watching through six of them. And that’s just her—you watched the others too, both groups—and Jack too. Hooked to your machines you never dreamt, but these days your sleep is full of fallen ruins caught in sandstorms, of hallways glowing purple and carved into jaws, your name carved in strange kennings into the stone: _seeker of truth, angel_.

Maya smiles. Sunbeams fall through cracks in the walls to glide over the blue swirls of her skin and you remember Lilith’s theory of moving targets, of the burn of her eyes; you think of how entirely you know them, all of them, with their hungry eyes and bloody hands, how through watching and knowing and guiding you have made them yours.

She’s right: this is what you were made for.

-

This is what you know: eventually you will leave, but Pandora will never let you go.


End file.
